Building an evidence-based understanding of urban India, its governance and citizenship
The Research and Insights (R&I) team, while operating as a strand in itself, also operates as a horizontal across all programs in Janaagraha. R&I supports all programmatic monitoring, evaluation and learning while also providing other relevant data, insights and thought leadership to support and further the mission and vision of the organisation.
We leverage our research and insights function to ensure that our programs are data and evidence-driven, to make data easy to understand, contextualise and disseminate, and to inform policy and decision-making in the urban governance ecosystem. We primarily focus on independent research projects, thought leadership initiatives, and performance monitoring, evaluation and learning functions for internal programs.
Over the last decade, we have undertaken research in 22 states and 60 cities across the country, developing deep expertise in urban research. We have worked with and been funded by a range of institutions such as the Ford Foundation, the Asia Foundation, Brown University (USA) and the World Bank.
Janaagraha-Brown Citizenship Index
This ongoing project between Janaagraha and Brown University examines the relationship between citizenship and the delivery of public services. It involves approximately 37,000 citizen surveys in 17 cities across the country.
Affordable Housing
Funded by Reall, this project paints a cohesive picture of the affordable housing ecosystem. It synergises and analyses a repository of over 1200 data points across geographies in India. It is currently under peer review.
Gender and Property Tax
A joint study conducted in partnership with the World Bank, this research project analyses the impact of gender-based property tax discounts on female home ownership, tax compliance and municipal revenues. Data was collected through FDGs with homeowners and in-depth interviews with government officials across multiple cities and states. The paper is currently under peer review.
Safety and Security
A series of projects that analysed Bengaluru City Police’s Community Policing program and also evaluated safety and security perceptions among women in Mysore and Hubli-Dharwad.
Voter List Management
This series of research studies quantified the quality of urban voter lists and examined the causes of errors in them. Conducted in 21 cities across the country, this landscape study included extensive household surveys, voter-list-centric verification, interviews with Booth Level Officers (BLOs) and secondary data collection from a range of sources.
Work
